GERHARD, Roberto (1896 - 1970)

G Bolamar ediciones musicales, S.L.

El autor: [Valls,]

Roberto Gerhard's career may be divided in two halves - before and after exile. Born in Valls, Catalonia, in 1896, he achieved local recognition already in his early twenties, with the first performances and publication of a substantial song-cycle and a Piano Trio. After studying with Schoenberg in Berlin (1923-8), he returned to Barcelona, becoming the prime figurehead in contemporary music there. While continuing to compose, he taught composition, worked as a researcher at the Bibioteca di Catalunya, and wrote well-informed though often polemical articles about new music for leading newspapers and magazines . Gerhard breathed fresh life into the Barcelona musical scene, opening it up to ideas from the rest of Europe. He brought Schoenberg and Webern to Barcelona and helped publicise and the work of other prominent artists such as Bartok and Hanns Eisler. With the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Gerhard left to live in Cambridge, England, where a minor research fellowship had been arranged for him at King's College. He and his wife, Poldi - whom he had met in Vienna as a member of the Schoenberg circle and married in 1930 - lived there for the rest of their lives. In exile, Gerhard made a living writing incidental music for radio and the theatre and his reputation grew throughout the 1950s and 60s, leading to commissions for substantial works from the BBC and other bodies. In the early 1960s, he became known in the USA, where he taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Berkshire Music Centre, Tanglewood. At this time, his music began to get published again and recorded: and numerous younger generation musicians and conductors were attracted to his exciting, innovatory late works - most notably the conductor David Atherton, then founder-conductor of the London Sinfonietta, who presented a conspectus of the entire chamber works of Gerhard and Schoenberg in 1972. Gerhard died in 1970; his wife outlived him by 24 years. Following his death, his music was rather neglected. But a wave of new recordings and publications appearing since the celebrations of the centenary of his birth in 1996 has re-awakened interest in and enthusiasm for Gerhard's music - not least in Spain where, during the Franco regime, his music was officially ignored.